Are you an illustrator? I'm looking for someone to collaborate with in the aim of bringing out an illustrated book of some of my 'serious doggerel for adult children'. Please contact me if you think we might be able to work together.

May 20, 2014

If cultural studies were not so wrapped up in the vapid and fleeting, to the point where they forget all about Baudelaire's injunction to find 'the eternal in the ephemeral', they might just be able to discern some important truths about the sacred character of popular music.

Les Murray has compellingly described religion as poetry spoken 'in loving repetition'. When I was 13 I was baptized in the Catholic church. I had been the only unbaptized student in a Catholic elementary school, and it was judged at some point that I might fit in better if I were to become a member of the flock. I acquiesced, happily, and for a year or so I muttered the rosary with deep inward yearning, an obsessive-compulsive freak: in loving repetition.

This experience overlaps in my memory with a period of intense, ridiculous, adolescent Beatlemania. I knew all their birthdays, all their parents' birthdays, the precise layouts of the streets of Liverpool, of Hamburg, the bra size of May Pang. I knew, most of all, the precise contours of every available recording of every Beatles song, whether canonical or bootleg.

I do not remember whether the Beatles came before, or after, the Catholicism. What I remember is that they blended perfectly into one another in my fantasy life.

Now the recordings, though I played them back in loving repetition, were not, strictly speaking, repeated. They were each performed only once, in a studio, at some point in the 1960s, before I was born. Perhaps these singular performances involved tracks, and so multiple recordings of different elements, but in any case the whole production of the authoritative version was completed in a finite, no doubt very short, series of steps.

What was produced was what Nelson Goodman would call an 'allographic' artwork: a work that can be fully experienced even if the thing itself remains remote, even if the thing itself is indefinable. My copy of the White Album, scooped up at a San Francisco garage sale from some kindly hippie, repairing his VW bus, circa 1985, cannot in any sense be said to be the White Album, and yet I have experienced the White Album as fully as anyone has simply by bringing this copy home and putting it on the record player and listening to it: in loving repetition.

The recording of that album fixed and eternalized a number of contingencies, a number of things that could just as well not have happened: some words muttered, George's fingers staying on the strings a microsecond too long and generating that superfluous but not unpleasant string noise for which I'm sure there's a term. These contingencies become canonical. They are awaited lovingly by the knowing listener. They arrive as expected, and they reconfirm the aesthetic order of the world.

This reconfirmation is just as strong when it is experienced in supposedly bad pop music as when it is experienced in the great instances. It is there when Rufus calls out to Chaka Khan, and when Paula Abdul dismisses her would-be lover with just the number of stuttered consonants she has to offer up, and not more or less: B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bye. Who, tuned into the FM radio universe of the mid-1980s, did not know what that number was? Who could not feel it coming on, and feel it, when it came, reconfirming the order? This is an unusual way of experiencing music: in the form of allographic, canonical tokens of singular type-recordings. But it supervenes on something much older, even something primordial.

For me, conceptual questions in aesthetics, and perhaps in philosophy in general, are best answered genealogically. And a key genealogical question to be asked for most modern and technologically mediated art forms is: What is that human experience out of which this new form emerges? In the case of cinema, we are fairly familiar by now with the analysis of this new art form into its constitutive ancestral lineages: the realist novel, certain schools of European painting, the shadow theater. We know, also, that the era of musical recording was preceded by a period of commercial standardization of sheet music, which was sold and distributed and played around household pianos by a bourgeoisie that was generally far more musically literate than would be later consumers of vinyl, or CDs, or of the services of Spotify.

The domestic performance of sheet music allowed, certainly, for variability in each instance, but the very standardization of the notes on the page was already a stage on the way towards recording. What surely remained most variable, when families gathered around pianos, was the recitative element, that is, the lyrics, the part of music that has the most evident share in poetry.

To the extent that music involves repetition, whether of melodies or chords or words, it is all rooted in poetry. This is ancient, but still clear in certain traditions that survive into the era of recording, such as the Russian bard style of Vysotsky (the homonymy with Shakespeare's moniker is not coincidental). Here, as in the music of Seikilos, there is a cycle of words, whose transcendent or non-mundane force is heightened by an accompanying string instrument, but not subordinated to that instrument. In general, if one wishes to find the pre-recording roots of popular music, one does well to look, not only to the history of music strictly speaking (melody and harmony in particular), but also to traditions of oral poetry and oral lore. Alan Lomax seems to have understood this very well in his field recordings: he realized he could not go in and ask only to hear the tunes of Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta, but had to listen to the folk tales as well.

We know that a number of the world's most glorious works of epic poetry, including Homeric epic, began as traditions of oral recitation, presumably involving some degree of rhythmic articulation, and perhaps also inflections of the voice's pitch and timber. In this respect, literature and music are really only different trajectories of the same deeper aesthetic activity: a repetition that reconfirms, or reestablishes, or perhaps recreates, the order of the world. To be invested in this repetition aesthetically is to experience it with love, which again, following Murray, is nothing other than religion itself.

I've been reading recently the transcribed version of the Yakut heroic epos, the Olonkho-- considered to be the Urtext of pre-Islamic Turkic mythology, preserved across the centuries in the oral tradition of northeastern Siberia. It speaks of snow, and reindeer, and human beings, and ancestors, and the transcendent cause of all of this. What I am reading is a trace, not the real thing, and it is enjoyable to attempt to imagine the proper mise-en-scène, by a trusted elder, of these events to which I have only minimal access, and from which the trace nature of the textual version distances me even more. One imagines an expert raconteur, someone who relates the Olonkho with a degree of mastery comparable to the mastery we recognize as involved in conducting the Ring Cycle or playing Othello.

What one would particularly relish, it is easy to imagine, experiencing the recitation directly, and intimately, would be the variety of deviations, and the way the master raconteur controls the deviations for such-and-such desired effect. 'Here comes that part where he's going to make a bear-grunt noise!' the Yakut adolescent might think to himself. And then it comes, and it's slightly different than the last time, yet perfectly, satisfyingly different. The repetitions are irreducibly social, variable yet constant, and mediated through a figure who in turn mediates between the human and the transhuman spheres of existence.

It is an unusual state of affairs when the repetition can be experienced both in a way that is not directly social, at home with headphones on in front of a record player, and in a way that involves total invariability from one 'performance' to the next. My experience of the Catholic faith was also somewhat unusual: it consisted almost entirely in private mutterings of memorized prayers, in a way that remained almost completely oblivious to the existence of the Church, the coming together of two or more people that in turn calls God to presence as well. But these obsessive compulsions, like the socially mediated recitation of epic, or like technologically mediated communion with god-like pop stars through recorded tokens of their canonical creations, are all, as I've said, the work of love.

This love seems to send a person straight outside of himself. But since this cannot really happen, since we all in fact stay right where we are, the ecstasy arrives in the next best way possible: through a cycling back, again and again, to the syllables and sounds that order the world, and that may give some hint of its true cause and nature.

January 21, 2014

From the point of view of air, the edge of earthis everywhere. Which, mowing away the clouds,coincides - no matter how they covertheir tracks - with the sensation of a heel.And the eye that looks aroundmows, as your sickle, the fields;the sum of small places added in change,is less knowable than zero.And a smile will show forth like the shadow of a rookupon a pock-marked hedge, holding downthe splendid thick of the rosebush, but cryingthrough honeysuckle with closed beak.

January 1, 2014

Around the same time English-language philosophers were debating whether or not you can know what it is like to be a bat (generally deciding that you can not), the Australian poet Les Murray was busy directly transcribing the thought-world of an imagined representative of this order. Here are the final six lines from his 1986 poem, "Bat's Ultrasound":

Murray channels the inner language of other species as well. For instance, pigs, in his 1992 poem, "Pigs":

Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted.Never stopped growing. We sloughed, we soughedand balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was uswith weight-buried hooves. Or bristly, with milk.

While the individual pig refers to the collectivity as 'us', Murray imagines that cattle conceptualize that same first-person plural as 'me'. This from "The Cows on Killing Day" of 1998:

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human

and is angry. All me look nervously at her

as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy

of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

The individual 'me' (to the extent that these can be individuated), the cow that narrates the poem, ends up slaughtered by a blade, and now sees the blood, or perhaps the guts, running out of her as 'me' too:

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.

All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,

and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

So, it turns out you can know what it is like to be a bat, or a pig, or a cow. As far as I am concerned, Murray proves as much: he offers a verisimilar report on the inner world of these animals. He does so 'shamanistically', to deploy one of his own key concepts. He moves himself poetically into a position of certainty, a position that overcomes the skeptical limitations of philosophers, which are, one now sees, the same limitations that constrain the philosophers to write in prose.

Murray is often criticized, particularly by fellow Australians, for his presumption of authority, for his self-assured declamations about how the world really is. But this is to fail to engage with the poet on his own terms. Murray's certainty is not like the 'intuition' of armchair philosophy, which purports to be getting the world right in view of a unique capacity possessed by human beings, called 'reason', a capacity that all too often with distance or retrospection can easily turn out to be a mere cataloguing of prejudices. Murray's reports are rather, by his own description, a result of the proper combination of three varieties of mental activity: daytime consciousness, dreamtime consciousness, and 'the body'. Any writing that does not pay proper respect to all three of these is mendacious. It is the last of them, in particular, that gives the poet access to certainty about how the world, or nature, is, since this certainty is really only something that he shares with everything else in nature, but from which language has the power to cut us off. In an astoundingly simple, direct, self-assured, and utterly true poem of 2002 called "The Meaning of Existence," Murray sums up his metaphysics (if that word may be used):

Everything except languageknows the meaning of existence. Trees, planets, rivers, timeknow nothing else. They express it moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a bodylives it in part, and would have full dignity within it but for the ignorant freedom of my talking mind.

One of my regular preoccupations in this space is to provide some sort of account for why, in spite of my official job title, I do not feel naturally inclined to philosophy. The most straightforward account might just be to say that I share Murray's metaphysics entirely. I know nature knows what's going on. I believe philosophy, or prosaic argument, or 'daytime consciousness', is the cause of the loss of this certainty, and not at all the best hope for preventing this loss. I believe Descartes's argument that he is not dreaming, quite apart from the question of its soundness or validity, represents the limitations of the tradition in which I am implicated; it takes for granted that dreams are spurious trickery, rather than vehicles of truth. I believe Descartes is mistaken about dreams. (I know I'm sounding like a vapid new-ager, but the fact that I can only sound this way, in saying something that ought to be obvious, is itself a measure of the depth of the prejudice I am trying to expose.)

Murray has said that poetry beckoned him from an early age "by its not putting humans above other subject matter." He credits his early life on a farm as the initial source of his animistic sensibility. In politics, he claims to be above the left-right divide, but is defiantly anti-Marxist and scornful of the formulae of academic leftism. He believes that the rural point of view is one that is systematically left out of academic attention to the various species of otherness, complaining of his early experience "of being relegated and scorned, as a country bumpkin, an uncultured yahoo, all that sanctified anti-rural prejudice that goes right back to classical times and which no antidiscrimination law or postcolonial rhetoric ever protects you from—so to hell with those." Of course, at the same time, he presumes to know all possible forms of otherness-- if you can know what it is like to be a bat, then it is not so difficult to work your way into the thought-world of an Australian Aborigene, or to imagine that you have worked your way in. Murray's complaint is not that the urban academics do not value otherness enough, but that in their limited daytime consciousness they are unable to appreciate what is really at stake in being other.

I probably value New Left prose and arguments a good deal more than Murray does, but I also appreciate his defiance of the prevailing left ideas about the forms otherness can take. When I hear academics carrying on about 'intersectionality', and composing recipes for social difference from a very short list centered upon race, gender, and sexual identity, I want to ask: but what do we get from the intersection of a Hmong peasant, say, or an Amazonian forager, with the institutions of modern society, institutions to which all intersectionality fans --being essentially urban, western, and bourgeois-- submit as if these were timeless and self-evident (particular inheritance structures, the use of first and last names, monogamous pair-bonding as the basis of child-rearing, the relative importance of fathers and unimportance of maternal uncles, a more or less utilitarian conception of human well-being...)? What about the animals? What about the ancestors? Anthropology has typically done better than philosophy at accounting for the true depth and range of human difference, but it too is constrained to do so in the language of daytime consciousness, even as it comes up against subjects and structures that are understood equally by means of dreaming and the body by the people who live them, the people for whom they have meaning.

Poetry is infinitely better equipped; it is not another domain of inquiry, but rather another modality of thought. It alone enables a person to move away from the circumstances of identity and to claim to speak for others, or for everything at once, with the universal 'me' of a cow.

December 18, 2013

What is all this writing for? I don't mean only, or principally, the writing found here. I mean the activity around which I structure my life, the cyborg attachment to a keyboard on which I can now type while looking around at the world, at passing dogs and children, even if I am more likely looking at some other text, a text I did not myself write, on another part of the screen. I mean this thing I do that was once considered a specialized activity like musicianship -- as when villages had scribes who could draft letters for you, you who could see nothing but meaningless ink marks on parchment -- but is now just part of life. Everyone does it, or at least many, many people do, and yet I am one of the few from among those many who imagines it is the thing that I do. I didn't choose it, and I don't really know what it is.

I imagine, when I am happy, that I am slowly but surely coming up with a body of work that will, in some format or other, survive me. But I am seldom happy, or at least happy enough to really believe that I am doing anything other than stabbing blindly. For one thing, it is all à côté de la plaque. I am supposed to be producing scholarship, philosophy scholarship to be precise, yet I keep feeling myself drawn back to other forms, setting up as my models people who were not arguers at all, but stylists, people who had no theories, but only visions. For another thing, I sincerely believe that we are entering a period of post-literacy, and the real creative work that is going on right now, the real sculpting of visions into works that can be left to posterity, is increasingly happening elsewhere than in strings of words. Yet here I am, once again, stringing together words...

I still earnestly hope to contribute something to philosophy. It is already certain that if this is going to happen at all, the significance will be an orthogonal significance; it will come from the side, and clarify in virtue of its impurity. If it happens at all. But this earnest desire coexists, problematically, with two other deep motivations. One is to leave concepts and arguments and footnotes behind, which on a certain line of thinking is all artifice; to go instead with Seamus Heaney, who understood: "Now the good life could be to cross a field / And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe / Of ploughs." Another motivation, whose relation to this one just mentioned is still unclear to me, is to blow up the arguments and the footnotes from the inside, by means of satire.

Juvenal said that "it is difficult not to write satire," but I think he meant something different than what I am now trying to get at. here. The Roman author felt that the world itself was ridiculous, and did not merit earnesty. I would like to address my subjects with seriousness, but they just keep addressing themselves to my satirical sense. It is not my fault. So, Juvenal. My satire, though, is my fault. It grows up inside of me, like cataracts from excessive reading. It results from a certain disposition or attitude toward the skills I've set out to master.

But what is satire? In a certain sense, it is just a display of mastery. I think here of a Russian film I saw years ago, whose title and details I forget, which featured a Soviet emigré working as a violinist in a restaurant in Paris. He is a master, and he is bored and disappointed with life. He amuses himself by putting the bow between his legs and playing the violin upside down. This is satire: showing that you can do, à rebours, what you're supposed to be doing right-side up; you can do your school-boy routine with your hands tied behind your back. You can do it with your groin. And as with playing, so with writing. Satire is a demonstration that you are so good at what you are supposed to be doing that you can do it in a way you're not supposed to.

But why do this? Wouldn't it be better to cross a field, to take to the plough? I have perhaps set off an a bad foot with the example of the depressed Russian violinist, for there are arguments for the edifying quality of such exercises. If you succeed in producing a fake work, after all (say, a fake scholarly article with fake footnotes to nonexistent books), then you have not just shown off mastery, you have also helped yourself to attain a sort of maker's knowledge. You haven't just provided a study of some narrow sliver of the world; you've created a whole parallel world, of which you now have, so to speak, omniscient para-knowledge.

Here of course we are returned to the basic distinction Aristotle makes between history and poetics: the historian (and by extension what we would call the 'scholar') tells you about the actual, whereas the poet's domain of concern ranges over all possibles. The great satirist (and I have Laurence Sterne in mind, as usual), brings into being a possible world that, if it were to exist, would be very close to our own, but he gets to create it from scratch, as he pleases, according to phancy rather than to the demands of either the empirical world (what happens) or of reason (what governs our take on what happens). This is why philosophers read Locke but not Sterne, and Aristotle but not Herodotus (whom the Philosopher faulted for not yet liberating history from poetry). And this is why anyone who wishes to be a historian-poet, or a scholar-satirist, faces a fundamental dilemma.

But there may be better reason than ever to fight to tame this two-horned bull, to dominate it and ride it, and this reason may be connected to the post-literacy above mentioned. It is growing increasingly hard to justify the current system of resarch. In a certain sense, 19th-century philologists (for example) created works of scholarship to which no single scholar's work today could hold a candle. But there is now a transhuman entity, the Internet, that has taken the great bulk of what was written in the 19th century, digitized it, and brought into being a practically infinite super-work that makes the production of further detailed and exhaustive work mostly otiose. No one is doing work like they used to do, yet the available body of knowledge is growing like never before. You no longer need me, or any one else, to tell you the definitive story, within the space of a book, of whaling or metallurgy or the ontological proof for the existence of God. Or, rather, you no longer need me to just tell you the story. You need me to do something to it, to set it off somehow, perhaps in a nearby and carefully distorted world. Knowledge is abundant; it is being shifted to the close-out bins. What is in short supply, and undervalued, is creative appropriation of knowledge, which, again, might someday come to be seen as the true display of knowledge acquisition, of mastery.

It is hard not to notice that even as student papers get worse and worse, as the charade of thesis statements and carefully crafted argumentative sentences and so on becomes ever harder for either side to ignore, there is a small subset of the rising generation that seems, as if spontaneously, to be preserving the age-old concerns of the humanities: the art-school kids. I well understand how easy it is to dismiss them as frivolous, as mere hangers-on of a particular 'scene'. But let us be serious: where are you more likely to find an undergraduate who can tell you the general themes and outlines of, say, Hamlet? In the English department or in the fine arts program? The kids in the latter will be looking, perhaps, to do something with Hamlet, rather than (just) to understand it. They are probably interested in spoofing it, rather than revering it. But they are still our best hope. My money is on them.

Post-literacy will not mean the end of knowledge, but only the end of the system, in place for the past 600 years or so, of knowledge production and dissemination. In its place, if we are fortunate, there will be new forms of learning, perhaps some of which will return to older, pre-Gutenbergian praxis. After all, the book not only helped knowledge to expand, it also served as a crutch, and weakened our discipline for memorization and other forms of dematerialized mastery. Perhaps, now free of our bulky prostheses, we will return to forgotten exercises of the ars memoriae.

Ideally, also, mastery will be coupled with creative appropriation, that is to say with what is too easily set off to the side as satire. This coupling would also be the solution to a dilemma, one that haunts a particular species of restless soul, for which the straightfaced telling of what is the case could never be enough, and least of all now, when machines can do the telling for us.

June 18, 2013

I am able to read Walt Whitman only in
small doses, for fear of being overpowered by a sort of rapturous assent, tears
in my eyes, unable to comprehend how it is even possible to agree so fully with
someone else. I’ve only known Whitman for a few years. When I was in my
twenties, it was all Dostoevsky and Kafka and Beckett and Thomas Bernhard: the
period of European literature that extends from that continent’s extreme
unction up through its longwinded funeral orations. (Next came several years, wasted, in which I did not read any literature at all.) Now it's all Melville and
Whitman and the ecstatic birth of the American empire. But especially Whitman.
Only he manages to channel this history through his own body, to make himself
into the living instance of both the work he is in the process of creating, as well as of the national destiny for which he, with
stunning grandiosity, believes his work is a prophecy.

In view of my impending relocation to
France, just a few months from now, I had resolved to start reading French
literature again, to deepen my feeling for the language in all its registers. I
thought I'd get back to work on the Parisian working-class argot of the 1930s
by pushing along through more of Céline’s oeuvre. I made it twenty pages or so into his Mort à crédit, that misanthropic fascist rant, only then, by some motion of the hands I can't
even recall, to find myself, again, with Leaves of Grass.

Language-shapers on other shores,
Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn or desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left wafted hither,
I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it,)
Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more than it
deserves,
Regarding it all intently for a long while, then dismissing it, I stand in my
place with my own day here.

I am writing from Ottawa, June, 2013 (amused
by the prediction in Whitman’s 1871 prose work, Democratic Vistas, that
by the second centennial --thus by 1976-- both Cuba and ‘Kanada’ would be
included among ‘these States’). Naturally I reject Whitman's aggressive imperialism,
his promotion of the ideology of manifest destiny, and his unflinching devotion
to the 19th-century cult of progress. But even as I stand in my own place
in my own day, &c., I still sense that my own relation to Whitman's
prophecy must be more than a casual perusal or an intent regard.

I would be a sad and stunted person if I
were to agree to write only about those ideas and texts that fit narrowly
within my professional discipline, philosophy, like a goat kept in a stall too small for it to butt. I confess to a greater sympathy than most of my professional peers have (or reveal) for the sort of philosophy we
might call ‘wisdom of the ages’: the effusions that spill over into the
registers of poetry and religion; the approach that is ready to place the Vedas,
Zarathustra, etc., next to the canonical, argument-making texts and figures; the approach that supposes that even the most
unhinged ‘Enthusiasts’, the Swedenborgs and Ouspenskys and all the others, have
something to tell us about the range of human responses to real philosophical
problems (Kant also understood this in his engagement with Swedenborg’s nebular
hypothesis). The older I get, moreover, the more I become convinced that the
boundary is an artificial one; we accord to the poetic exuberance of certain
canonical figures a special and exceptional legitimacy that they do not really
deserve, largely in virtue of the rigorous work these figures have done in
other domains. For example, I really do not know that Leibniz, notwithstanding the infinitesimal calculus and the principle of sufficient reason, deserves to be
listened to any more than Whitman on, say, the question whether the body is the
unfolding of the soul, or whether every part of nature is contained in every part.

If we accept this broadened conception of
philosophy --that is, if we accept that philosophy has always been fueled and
shaped at least in part by poetic effusion (something Plato, certainly, would
not have denied)-- then Whitman, I claim, is a great philosopher. One sees traces, as
I’ve suggested, of Leibniz:

All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it.

One sees Kant (both a trace of the Copernican turn, as well as,
in the title of Whitman’s masterwork itself, an expression of the limits of
mechanism as applied to nature):

A child said What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full hands;How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

And one sees a sort of anticipation of Nietzsche’s attempt
to go jenseits of good and evil:

I make the poem of evil also- I commemorate that part also;I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is – And I say there is in fact no evil;(Or if there is, I say it is just as important to you, to the land, or to me, as anything else.)

Now of course Nietzsche’s partisans are going to insist
there is much more to it than this, that the German thinker has depths of
philosophical subtlety to which the American poet does not descend. I would
argue in fact that the principal difference is this, that while both are
prophets of the century to come, Nietzsche’s prophecy is one of the continent’s
impending self-destruction, while the discord between his own bedridden solitude
and his visions of a coming superman is almost painful to think about. Whitman’s
prophecy is one of his own country’s aggressive global assertion of itself, and
it is perfectly epitomized in his own robust sexual self-assertion (though of
course 20th-century American warmongers would not have been prepared
to see the roots of their own world-domination in pansexual polymorphous
desire). Nietzsche would like to move beyond good and evil, but he himself is
miserable; Whitman’s transvaluation of all values is full of life and joy, and
he is in all but the details (Kanada, etc.) absolutely right about the
ascendancy of the nation for which he takes himself to stand.

Whitman’s superman-to-come is what he calls a ‘literatus’.
He believes that only one nation can lead the world at a time, and he maintains
that it is the role of the literatus to provide the nation its soul, which is,
precisely, literature. He describes the virtues of the coming literatus both in
prose, in the Democratic Vistas:

A strong-fibred joyousness and faith, and
the sense of health al fresco, may well enter into the preparation of
future noble American authorship. Part of the test of a great literatus shall
be the absence in him of the idea of the covert, the lurid, the maleficent, the
devil, the grim estimates inherited from the Puritans, hell, natural depravity,
and the like. The great literatus will be know, among the rest, by his cheerful
simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his limitless faith in God, his
reverence, and by the absence in him of doubt, ennui, burlesque, persiflage, or
any strain’d and temporary fashion;

and in verse, in Leaves of Grass:

Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,Arouse! for you must justify me.

Whitman supposes that his work will serve
as a sort of seed for the birth of the new literati worthy of the American
superpower. Some of the most delirious passages of Leaves play on this seed metaphor to suggest, with a joyous
personal arrogance no weaker than the arrogance he hopes to bring about in
national character, that Whitman himself is fathering the future of America:

On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes;(This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)

Again and again Whitman channels the most
lofty political ideals and metaphysical visions through his own libidinous
body. He takes this body and its receptivity as itself the answer to ancient
questions, as to the nature of the soul, for example, and he refuses like no
other modern thinker to let the body’s essential appetitiveness compromise its value
as a philosophical clavis:

To be in any form, what is that?… If nothing lay more develop'd the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.

Mine is no callous shell,I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,To touch my person to some one else's is about as much as I can stand.

Often, what ought to be humorous, abrupt shifting
from the lofty to the base, comes across in Whitman as utterly sincere and
utterly valid:

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer.

All the self-loving stuff about his own 'musk', his love of beards, even the ecstatic ode to 'man-balls' and the 'man-root': somehow all this comes across with grace and dignity. The thin red jellies within you, or within me, for Whitman, are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul. There is no motion here between the high and low, the exalted and the base. The body is an explication of the soul, for Whitman as for
Leibniz, and for both it follows that the bodily self is immortal and coeval
with the cosmos itself:

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

For it the nebula cohered to an orb,The long slow strata piled to rest it on,Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.

All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me,Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.

Whitman’s cosmism, or rather kosmism, his sensitivity to the relations between the various orders of being, to the simultaneous difference and identity of the astronomical, the geological, the biological, and the spiritual, constitutes the very core of his ontology, and this is because it is here that Whitman is able to spell out his otherwise supremely egotistical vision of himself as the center of the world, but a center that enfolds and expresses everything else:

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, But call any thing back again when I desire it.

In fact, a moment’s thought will make clear that nothing in Whitman is more Leibnizian than the poet’s most famous phrase, I contain multitudes. The great difference however is that Whitman offered this as a defiant celebration of the self-contradiction of which he stood accused, while Leibniz spent his life arguing that the world, which is to say multiplicity in unity, does not and cannot involve contradiction.

Whitman’s kosmism is central to his understanding of his own vocation as a prophet: he believes the American literature to come, and thus the American soul, must engage with nature in a way never before attempted in European thought. As he explains in Democratic Vistas:

In the prophetic literature of
these States, ... Nature, true Nature, and the true idea of Nature, long
absent, must, above all, become fully restored, enlarged, and must furnish the
pervading atmosphere to poems, and the test of all high literary and esthetic
compositions. I do not mean the smooth walks, trimm'd hedges, poseys and
nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its geologic
history, the kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls through the illimitable
areas, light as a feather, though weighing billions of tons.

This is a remarkable twist on, and departure from, the German aesthetics of the sublime (which in turn reaches back to Shaftesbury). The Germans had wanted to offer up the infinite complexity of nature against the French mania for prim geometric gardening (controle total du monde végétal, as the explicit aim of the Paris Jardin des Plantes was once famously stated). But the preferred examples were generally just unkempt gardens, patches of moss, and, yes, leaves of grass. Whitman wishes in his idea of nature to go beyond the biological alone, to encompass the magmic, the Earth's crust and mantle and core, planetary and celestial orbits, and to do so in a way that precisely does not make any ontological divisions, but sees the self as no less air than gneiss than grass than sauroid. It is this conception of the environmental sublime --which remains attuned to the cycles that move the same stuff through the upper atmosphere, along the earth's surface, and deep beneath it, and which sees these cycles as unfolding through deep time-- that informs the best writing about the American West (I am thinking in particular here of Cormac McCarthy and Gary Snyder, to name just a few).

Unlike for Kant, there is nothing particularly wonderful about a leaf of grass, and while Whitman would not deny that the leaf of grass could have its own Isaac Newton, he emphatically does not propose himself for this role. Hurrah for positive science! Whitman writes in the ‘Song of Myself’. Long live exact demonstration! But then he clarifies:

Gentlemen, to you the first honours always! Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,(I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.)

Whitman’s dwelling shares with science a preoccupation with the future, and it is as I've indicated in looking toward the future, in particular the coming century of American hegemony, facilitated by steam and electricity and so on, that the poet is most rapturously optimistic. Whitman’s distinction as a prophet comes in large part from the fact that he was, broadly speaking, right (though not every great prophet has or needs such a distinction), and if you are not ready to go along with his transvaluation of good and evil, then it is precisely this accuracy that also makes his legacy problematic in the extreme.

Nietzsche’s prophecy was vague and delusional, and if it was able to come to seem like an anticipation of German political history in the following century, this is in large part because Nietzsche was unable to keep his manipulable prophecy out of the hands of his manipulative Hitlerite sister. But Whitman was not delusional, and his prophecy involved a holocaust of its own: he explicitly and joyously cheers for the ongoing genocide against the Native Americans, which he believes is a sine qua non of the full realization of American greatness. He does not exclude the indigenous people from the poem of America, but he sees it as part of the primordial legacy of the place, as a feature of the landscape on which the future is to be built:

The red aborigines,Leaving natural breaths, …Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla,Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names.

It is wonderful that Whitman perceives the poetry in toponymy (Leibniz had seen in it, as an antiquarian rather than a futurist, the very key to the recovery of ancient wisdom). Yet it is disconsoling in the extreme to see that by the mid-19th century toponymous traces were all the part that the indigenous Americans were seen to have in the writing of the poem of America.

I do not like genocide, to say the least, and yet I began these notes by saying that I agree absolutely with Whitman. But what I meant to say was something like this: I was born and raised in a part of the American West that was in the process of becoming American at the time Whitman was writing, thanks to the very process of ethnic cleansing and cultural annihilation that Whitman so joyously promoted. I grew up surrounded by strip malls and freeways, and by adults who sustained the disgusting illusion --out of ignorance or cravenness, or a mixture of both-- that this was just the way things were always destined to be. The history of how this illusion could be passed off as truth is my own history, and Leaves of Grass tells me who I am, while Mort à crédit will forever remain the sort of literary work I can only peruse, admire, respectfully credit, before I return again to stand in my place with my own day here.

December 26, 2012

I've been reconsidering my earlier attempt to characterize the distinction between philosophical interests and extra-philosophical ones. I'm finding my initial stab at it more than inadequate. I sought at one point to say that it lies in one's appreciation of res singulares, of singular things, and that, though natural philosophers in the past would have disagreed, one handy criterion we have today for distinguishing between the philosophical and the non- is to accept as philosophical only that which doesn't directly concern itself with this particular plant or country or river or planet, but always stays far enough away from the abundance of singular things to, so to speak, maintain its dignity.

There is something to that, but I think, at least historically, another more significant line of demarcation, one that extends back to Aristotle and that remains perfectly relevant today in making snap judgments about whether a blog is a philosophy blog or not, is the collaboration between the metaphysics of substance and the law of the excluded middle that compels all of us following in the tradition of Western philosophy to affirm that any given thing can only be the thing it is. This sounds easy enough to accept, and at little cost, yet it leaves us ill-equipped to deal, for example, with Ovid, or the Grimms, or Saxo Grammaticus (about whom more in a second). We are familiar with Aristotle's distinction between poetry and history, as between that which ranges over the possible and that which relates the actual (and the fault of Herodotus, unlike Thucydides, had been to fail to grasp this distinction), but there is an even more fundamental distinction between different conceptions of possibility, depending on which 'laws' one starts with, and here you could say that philosophy and poetry are both subdivisions of the sort of thinking that ranges over the possible, and the crucial difference has to do with each subdivision's stance on the identity of things over time. Philosophy wants fixed things, substances; poetry --a significant portion of which we now call 'mythology'-- allows metamorphoses.

This is not at all a new observation; I am simply recalling it from my culture's storehouse of received wisdom in order to come to a clearer explanation than I was able to offer previously of why this is not a philosophy blog. It struck me last night as I was reading Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta danorum, a 12th-century compendium of Danish history and lore. In one incident recounted there, Hardgrep seeks the embraces of her foster son, Hadding. But she is descended from giants, and he complains that "the size of her body [is] unwieldy for the embraces of a mortal." Hardgrep assures him:

Youth, fear not the converse of my bed. I change my bodily outline in twofold wise, and am wont to enjoin a double law upon my sinews. For I conform to shapes of different figure in turn, and am altered at my own sweet will: now my neck is star-high, and soars nigh to the lofty Thunderer; then it falls and declines to human strength, and plants again on earth that head which was near the firmament. Thus I lightly shift my body into diverse phases, and am beheld in varying wise; for changefully now cramped stiffness draws in my limbs, now the virtue of my tall body unfolds them, and suffers them to touch the cloud-tops. Now I am short and straitened, now stretch out with loosened knee; and I have mutably changed myself like wax into strange aspects. He who knows of Proteus should not marvel at me. My shape never stays the same, and my aspect is twofold: at one time it contrasts its outstretched limbs, at another shoots them out when closed; now disentangling the members and now rolling them back into a coil. I dart out my ingathered limbs, and presently, while they are strained, I wrinkle them up, dividing my countenance between shapes twain, and adopting two forms; with the greater of these I daunt the fierce, while with the shorter I seek the embraces of men.

This kind of thing goes on more or less constantly in the world Saxo describes: humans coupling with relatives, with giants, with bears; being born from monstrous black seed, being kept alive by corrupt matter rather than blood. But none of this is ever really so damaging, since forms change freely, and there are advantages to being monstrous just as there are advantages to being comely.

Now Saxo is a Christian, writing in Latin, and he wavers between denying that such transformations are possible, and affirming that they are possible, but denouncing them as sinful. As for me, I definitely do not believe they are possible, but I also think it is extremely important for a humanist to reflect on why, in the majority of times and places in human history, people have spoken as if they were possible. There is one tradition in human history --descending from Greece, reaching Denmark by the 12th century CE (even as it retains its memory of pre-contact ways of thinking) and now dictating the range of things that can be said at academic conferences, and in polite society, in Java, the Amazon, and the Arctic-- in which such transformations are explicitly not possible, and this is the tradition I work in. These transformations do seep back into this tradition at different times and places, but usually more as a threat or a taunt than as anything like a conceptual revolution; thus the natural philosopher Richard Lower allowed a brief whiff of Ovidian metamorphoses into philosophical debate in 17th century England by succeeding in transfusing blood between species; and arguably much of what seems so outré about figures like Deleuze comes down in the end to their daring to chicken-walk at the boundary between the two subdivisions I've described. But for the most part, philosophy continues to define itself as the tradition that can take no interest in Ovid or Saxo and their flights into the impossible.

And anyway, to get back to the distinction I was attempting inadequately to make the other day: here I am very interested in giant women who wax into strange aspects, gods who appear as swans, &c. Which --and this is the key point-- seems pretty close to just another way of saying that this is not a philosophy blog.

November 19, 2012

A man went his way ·
dragging his steed ·
There my lord met him ·
With all of his men ·

How · is it going · man?
Why aren't you riding?
How can I ride when ·
my steed is all stiff?

Just push at his flank, man ·
while whispering to him ·
he'll step with his right foot ·
and get along good ·

A Blessing for a Journey (Weingartner Handschrift, 12th century)

I want to see you · I want to send for you
with my five fingers · my fifty-five angels ·
May God send you home safe ·
May triumph's door be open to you · and to you the door of sailing ·
May drowning's door be closed to you ·
and to you the door of fighting ·

*

Heinrich Heine

From Das Buch der Lieder (1827)

The Return

How can you sleep peacefully,Knowing, I live still?When the old anger comes again,I'll bend this yoke to my will.

Do you know the old song:How there once was a dead knave,Who grabbed his beloved at midnightAnd pulled her into his grave?

If you shall be my faithful wifeThen fortune on you shines.You'll live a gay and carefree lifeOf leisurely pastimes.

And if you scold and if you raveI'll abide it all with pleasure.But if my poems you will not praiseThen let us split forever.

*

Friedrich Hölderlin

The Ages of Life

You, cities of Euphrates!You, alleys of Palmyra!You forests of columns in the plain of the desert,What are you?The fire stripped youOf your crowns as you passedOver the border of the breathing By the smoke of the heavenly beings;But now I sit under clouds, in whichEach thing has its quietude, underWell-ordered oaks on the meadowOf deer, and strange to meAnd dead to me seemThe spirits of the blessed.

A Fragment of a Hymn

What is God? unknown, and yet

Is the face of heaven fullOf signs of him. Lightning in factIs the wrath of a god. The more one isInvisible, the more one conforms to what one is not. But thunderIs the glory of God. The love of immortality,As ours, is likewise the propertyOf a god.

*

Rainer-Maria Rilke

Judith's Return (1911)

Sleepers, black is the wetness still upon my feet, imprecise. Dew, you say.O, that I am Judith, I am come from him, from the tent from the bed, his head trickling, thrice-drunk blood. Wine-drunk, drunk on incense, drunk on me -- and now arid as dew. Low-held head above the morning grass; but I, above in my going, I erect.Brain suddenly empty, images flowing out into the earth; but I am still pricked in the heart by the whole breadth of the night's deed.Lover that I am.Horrors drive all the pleasures in me together, all places are on me.Heart, my famed heart, beat against the wind: as I go, as I goand faster the voice in me, my voice, which will call a birdcall before the city of need.

From the Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

A god could do it. But how, tell me, coulda man follow him through a narrow lyre?His sense is discord. At the crossing of twohearts' paths stands no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you teach it, is not desire,nor the announcement of something finally attained.Song is existence. For God it is easy.But when are we? And when will he turn

the earth and the stars toward our being?It is not this that you love, young one, even ifvoice forces open your mouth, -- learn

to forget that you are singing yourself empty. This shall pass.In truth singing is just another breath.A breath for nothing. A sighing in God. A wind.

The Duino Elegies (1912-22)

The First Elegy

Who then, if I cried out, would hear me from the orderof angels? and supposing one of them tooka sudden interest in me: I should wither from hismore powerful being. For the beautiful is nothing but terror's beginning, which we yet bear unbowed,and we marvel at it, as it calmly disdains to disturb us. Every angel is terrible.And so I restrain myself and swallow down the siren callof dark convulsion. O whom then are we able to need? Neither angels, nor men, and the clever beasts note this well, that we are not so solidly at home in the world as construed. There remains to us, perhaps, a tree on the hillside that we see again daily; there remain to us yesterday's streets, and the loyalty, which is forgiven, to a habitt hat suited us well, and thus stayed, and did not go. O and the night, the night, when the wind, full of world,wears down our faces--, for whom would she not remain, desired, gently disappointing, she who lies painfully in store for the solitary heart? Is she softer on those who love?Oh, they only hide with one another in their fate.Do you still not know it? Throw from your armsinto space the emptiness that we breath; perhaps the birds feel the expanded air with an inward flight.

Yes, the springtimes well needed you. Many a starexpected you to sprint. A wave raised itself up in the past, or,so that you should drop by the open window,a violin gave itself up. All this was the task.But did you manage it? Were you not alwaysscattered in expectation, as a beloved heraldedit all to you? (Where will you hide her,so that these great strange thoughts of yours should come in and out, and stay more often the night?)If you must sing of lovers, still is theirfamed feeling by far not immortal enough. You almost envy these abandoned ones, whom you found so much more loving than those who were appeased.Always begin anew the acclaim that is never to be attained;think: the hero maintains himself, even the downfall was for him only a pretext for being: his final birth.But exhausted nature takes the lovers backinto her, as if the strength to carry this offcould not come twice. Have you thought enoughthen of Gaspara Stampa, that any girl passed upby her beloved, on the aggravated exampleof these lovers, feels: that I might be like her?Should these oldest pains not at last becomemore fruitful to us? Is it not time that we lovinglyfree ourselves from the beloved, and tremblingly withstand,as the arrow withstands the string, in order in launchingto be more than itself? For remaining is nowhere.

Voices, voices. Hear, my heart, as else onlysaints have heard: that they raised the greatcall from the ground; but they kneltagain, impossible, and paid it no mind.Thus did they listen. Not that you would bearthe voice of God, not by far. But listen to the blowing,the uninterrupted news that is made up of silence. It is rustling now, from those young dead ones, to you.Wherever you entered, did their fate not calmly address you in the churches of Rome and Naples? Or an inscription was loftily borne to you,as of late that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.What do they want of me? Gently shall I shrug off the semblance of injustice that the puremotion of their spirits sometimes hinders a little.

It is indeed peculiar to inhabit the earth no longer,not to exercise skills barely learned, nor to giveto roses, and to other things that promise themselves,the significance of a human future;not to be what one was in infinitelyanxious hands, and to leave behindeven one's own name like a broken toy.Peculiar, to no longer wish wishes. Peculiar, to see everything fluttering that hungso loosely in space. And being dead is laboriousand full of catching up, so that one gradually sensesa bit of eternity. -- But all of the living makethis mistake, that they distinguish too sharply.The angels (it is said) would often not know, whetherthey were moving among the living or the dead. The eternal current always pulls all the ages along with it through both domains,and drowns them out in both.

In the end they need us no longer, the early departed,one is gently weaned of the earthly, as one meeklygrows away from the mother's breast. But we who needsuch large secrets, for whom blissful progress so often springs from mourning--: could we be without them? The story is in vain, that once in the lament for Lino's daring first music, barren torpor crept in;that first in the stunned space, into which an almost divine youthsuddenly entered forever, did the emptiness shift into that vibration, that now thrills us and comforts and helps.

*

Stefan George

From Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1895)

Speak not always Of the leaves · Violent breeze · Of the smashing Of ripe quinces · Of the coming Of destroyers At year's end. Of the quiver Of the darters In bad weather And the lights With the flicker Transient.

From Der siebente Ring (1907)

May you still by night and dayDemand your share · you trace ·In all my joys to have your place ·From every yield to take your pay?

My desire still awakens by your suckMe, whose ore you scraped out ·Me, whose wine you slurped out–In the loss do I still shiver at my luck?

Am I, now that you are slake,Mean with what I gave?Do I force you down in the grave ·Do I drive through your heart with a stake?

From Der Stern des Bundes (1914)

Is this the lad of ancient loreWho came from thence with flatterer's eyesWith rosy soft virgin's membersWith sumptuous tissues enticing?His trunk was slim and taut. He grasps ·He tempts no more · has no jewels.Shines with grit and lust for battleHis look . . his kiss is short and burning.His seed now shot from the holy shaftHe pushes into pain and danger.

From Das neue Reich (1928)

The Man and the Faun

The Man

A waterfall blocks the narrow creekbed--Who now extends a hairy legFrom this cliff's dribblingly fat moss?A horn peeks from a bushy ruffled head . . For as long as I have hunted in the mountain forestI have never met his likes… Be stillYour path has shifted • conceal nothingThrough a clear wave a goat's foot shows.

The Faun

Neither you nor I will be happy that you found me.

The Man

I knew indeed of your sort of people.From tales of old -- but not that todaySuch a needlessly ugly monster still lives.

The Faun

If you drive off the last of my kindYou will look in vain for noble creaturesYou will have nothing but rodents and wormsAnd when you pierce into the deepest thicketThe spring you need most will be dry.

The Man

So far beneath me you deign to teach? Our spiritHas brought down hydra giant dragonsHas cleared barren high forestWhere bogs stood fields of corn now heaveIn the juicy green our tame cattle grazeAnd there is still enough forest for hart and doe--We raised the treasures from sea and groundStones called out our victories to the heavens…What do you want you leftover of cruel wilderness?The light the order follow our trace.

The Faun

You are only a man .. where your wisdom endsOurs begins • you see the edge onlyWhere you have been punished for crossing itWhen your grain ripens your cattle flourishThe holy trees give oil and grapesYou imagine this comes only from your cunningThe earths that breath in the dull primordial nightNever perish • they are always disposedThey dissolve when a member escapes.For a good while your reign goes well •Now hurry back! you have seen the Faun.You do not know your worst: if your senseWhich can do much is caught in the cloudsThe bond has been broken with beast and clod--Disgust and desire movement and such And dust and sunbeam and dying and growingCan be comprehended in the course of things no more.

The Man

Who told you so? This is the concern of the gods.

The Faun

We speak not of them yet in your madnessYou believe that they themselves help you. UnmediatedHave they never approached you. You become you die--Whose true creature you are you never learn.

The Man

Soon there will be no room left for your licentious game.

The Faun

Soon you will call inside what outside you malign.

The Man

You poisonous fiend with crooked mouthIn spite of your misshapenness you are too closeTo us • otherwise you would get to know my weapon ..

The Faun

The beast knows no shame the man no thanks.With all the arts you still never learn What you most need .. but we still serve.So hear just this: wiping us out, you erase yourselves.Where our tufts grow alone comes milkWhere our hooves kick not there grows no straw.If your spirit alone had been at work: if long agoYour beat had been muffled with all you had doneYour wood had withered and your crops gone to seed ..Only by magic does life stay awake.

October 19, 2012

So the other day I passed by Montreal's best bookstore, Le Port de Tête, and picked up a used copy of Tristan Tzara's 1931 epic poem, L'homme approximatif. When I got it home, I noticed there was a slip of paper inserted between pages 52 and 53, and on it there was an anonymous poem, typed out and printed in that mimeographic purple ink I recall from childhood:

Whom do I know?

Scattered nobodies.

Whom do I love?

Your mother.

What don't I have?

A brother.

And where did he go?

We don't know.

What follows the night?

Light.

And how should I write?

(Slight):

As smooth as the silk of the worms of Cathay,

and as rhythmic as Edna St. Vincent Millay.

I Googled various lines of the poem, and nothing came up. It's evidently just some amateur trifle, yet something about it sticks with me, even more than anything I've found so far in Tzara's own poem. What was it doing there, between those pages? Why was it mimeographed decades ago? Who is the questioner? Who the respondent? Wby should one write in the recommended way? I would be delighted if, miraculously, the person with the answers were to step forward.

And you, beautiful Walt Whitman, sleep on the banks of the Hudsonwith your beard toward the pole and with open hands.In bland clay or in snow, your tongue cries out for comrades to watch over your gazelle without a body.Sleep, nothing remains. A dance of walls agitates the prairiesand America drowns in machines and lamentation.I want the strong air of the most profound nightto remove the flowers and letters from the arc where you sleepand a black boy to announce to the whites with their goldthe coming of the reign of corn.

September 27, 2012

A waterfall blocks the narrow creekbed--Who now extends a hairy legFrom this cliff's dribblingly fat moss?A horn peeks from a bushy ruffled head . . For as long as I have hunted in the mountain forestI have never met his likes… Be stillYour path has shifted • conceal nothingThrough a clear wave a goat's foot shows.

The Faun

Neither you nor I will be happy that you found me.

The Man

I knew indeed of your sort of people.From tales of old -- but not that todaySuch a needlessly ugly monster still lives.

The Faun

If you drive off the last of my kindYou will look in vain for noble creaturesYou will have nothing but rodents and wormsAnd when you pierce into the deepest thicketThe spring you need most will be dry.

The Man

So far beneath me you deign to teach? Our spiritHas brought down hydra giant dragonsHas cleared barren high forestWhere bogs stood fields of corn now heaveIn the juicy green our tame cattle grazeAnd there is still enough forest for hart and doe--We raised the treasures from sea and groundStones called out our victories to the heavens…What do you want you leftover of cruel wilderness?The light the order follow our trace.

The Faun

You are only a man .. where your wisdom endsOurs begins • you see the edge onlyWhere you have been punished for crossing itWhen your grain ripens your cattle flourishThe holy trees give oil and grapesYou imagine this comes only from your cunningThe earths that breath in the dull primordial nightNever perish • they are always disposedThey dissolve when a member escapes.For a good while your reign goes well •Now hurry back! you have seen the Faun.You do not know your worst: if your senseWhich can do much is caught in the cloudsThe bond has been broken with beast and clod--Disgust and desire movement and such And dust and sunbeam and dying and growingCan be comprehended in the course of things no more.

The Man

Who told you so? This is the concern of the gods.

The Faun

We speak not of them yet in your madnessYou believe that they themselves help you. UnmediatedHave they never approached you. You become you die--Whose true creature you are you never learn.

The Man

Soon there will be no room left for your licentious game.

The Faun

Soon you will call inside what outside you malign.

The Man

You poisonous fiend with crooked mouthIn spite of your misshapenness you are too closeTo us • otherwise you would get to know my weapon ..

The Faun

The beast knows no shame the man no thanks.With all the arts you still never learn What you most need .. but we still serve.So hear just this: wiping us out, you erase yourselves.Where our tufts grow alone comes milkWhere our hooves kick not there grows no straw.If your spirit alone had been at work: if long agoYour beat had been muffled with all you had doneYour wood had withered and your crops gone to seed ..Only by magic does life stay awake.

January 13, 2012

Who then, if I cried out, would hear me from the orderof angels? and supposing one of them tooka sudden interest in me: I should wither from his more powerful being. For the beautiful is nothing but terror's beginning, which we yet bear unbowed, and we marvel at it, as it calmly disdains to disturb us. Every angel is terrible.And so I restrain myself and swallow down the siren call of dark convulsion. O whom then are we able to need? Neither angels, nor men, and the clever beasts note this well, that we are not so solidly at home in the world as construed. There remains to us, perhaps, a tree on the hillside that we see again daily; there remain to us yesterday's streets, and the loyalty, which is forgiven, to a habitt hat suited us well, and thus stayed, and did not go. O and the night, the night, when the wind, full of world,wears down our faces--, for whom would she not remain, desired, gently disappointing, she who lies painfully in store for the solitary heart? Is she softer on those who love?Oh, they only hide with one another in their fate.Do you still not know it? Throw from your arms into space the emptiness that we breath; perhaps the birds feel the expanded air with an inward flight.

Yes, the springtimes well needed you. Many a starexpected you to sprint. A wave raised itself up in the past, or,so that you should drop by the open window,a violin gave itself up. All this was the task.But did you manage it? Were you not alwaysscattered in expectation, as a beloved heraldedit all to you? (Where will you hide her,so that these great strange thoughts of yours should come in and out, and stay more often the night?)If you must sing of lovers, still is theirfamed feeling by far not immortal enough. You almost envy these abandoned ones, whom you found so much more loving than those who were appeased.Always begin anew the acclaim that is never to be attained;think: the hero maintains himself, even the downfall was for him only a pretext for being: his final birth.But exhausted nature takes the lovers backinto her, as if the strength to carry this offcould not come twice. Have you thought enoughthen of Gaspara Stampa, that any girl passed upby her beloved, on the aggravated exampleof these lovers, feels: that I might be like her?Should these oldest pains not at last becomemore fruitful to us? Is it not time that we lovinglyfree ourselves from the beloved, and tremblingly withstand,as the arrow withstands the string, in order in launchingto be more than itself? For remaining is nowhere.

Voices, voices. Hear, my heart, as else onlysaints have heard: that they raised the greatcall from the ground; but they kneltagain, impossible, and paid it no mind.Thus did they listen. Not that you would bear the voice of God, not by far. But listen to the blowing,the uninterrupted news that is made up of silence. It is rustling now, from those young dead ones, to you.Wherever you entered, did their fate not calmly address you in the churches of Rome and Naples? Or an inscription was loftily borne to you,as of late that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.What do they want of me? Gently shall I shrug off the semblance of injustice that the pure motion of their spirits sometimes hinders a little.

It is indeed peculiar to inhabit the earth no longer,not to exercise skills barely learned, nor to giveto roses, and to other things that promise themselves, the significance of a human future;not to be what one was in infinitelyanxious hands, and to leave behindeven one's own name like a broken toy.Peculiar, to no longer wish wishes. Peculiar, to see everything fluttering that hung so loosely in space. And being dead is laboriousand full of catching up, so that one gradually sensesa bit of eternity. -- But all of the living makethis mistake, that they distinguish too sharply.The angels (it is said) would often not know, whether they were moving among the living or the dead. The eternal current always pulls all the ages along with it through both domains,and drowns them out in both.

In the end they need us no longer, the early departed, one is gently weaned of the earthly, as one meekly grows away from the mother's breast. But we who need such large secrets, for whom blissful progress so often springs from mourning--: could we be without them? The story is in vain, that once in the lament for Lino's daring first music, barren torpor crept in; that first in the stunned space, into which an almost divine youth suddenly entered forever, did the emptiness shift into that vibration, that now thrills us and comforts and helps.

March 12, 2011

I came late to the realization that poetry is what matters most. I lived fully immersed in the era so well picked out by Walter Benjamin, das prosaische Zeitalter, and so I filled up my free time with novels: sentence after descriptive sentence, telling a story that read like a movie.

Nowadays, however, it's either primary or secondary literature either more or less connected with what in my line of work is called the 'AOS'; or it is poetry.

I would like to mention two very different poets I have been reading recently. The first of them is anonymous.

Now let me begin by saying I would be the first to bemoan the Christianization of Scandinavia. Had it not happened so early on, we would have had indigeneous, European pagans, with pagan religion and pagan customs, to marvel at and to study. What we have instead are a few properly pagan rune stones, but mostly just descriptions of the pagan era from the high period of medieval Scandinavian literature, which occurred already a couple of centuries after the mass conversion.

However, I have to admit that this renunciation of Odinism from the 10th-century Hallfred's Saga is one of the most beautiful accounts of conversion I have come across:

It's the creed of the sovereignof Sogn, to ban sacrifices.We must renounce manya long-held decree of Norns.All mankind casts Odin's wordsto the winds. Now I am forcedto foresake Freyja's kinand pray to Christ.

*

The other poet I wanted to mention is Wallace Stevens. I had recently been mentioning to people whose tastes I respect (more or less) that I was enjoying going back to T. S. Eliot after many years, in particular to The Waste Land, which seems to me to be tinged with the occult in just the way modernist poetry ought to be: enriched by the Tarot and by chants of shanti in the same way that Rilke's poetry is enriched by angels. Enriched without existential commitment.

But whenever I mentioned Eliot, I would hear in response something like: I'm more of a Wallace Stevens man myself. (As if we were talking about the Yankees and the Mets!) I had never read Wallace Stevens, and I didn't understand why he and Eliot were being juxtaposed in this way. Now I have read Stevens, and I still don't understand.

But anyway, for the most part I remain more of an Eliot man. Stevens is modern, but he is modern not so much like Bauhaus as like the Hartford Indemnity Co., where he spent his entire career. I almost feel like I could have guessed his place of employment, without having read anything of his biography, simply from the quality of the verses. There are, in particular, all the trips to Florida, which was not as awful in the early 20th century as it is now; but which was, if I may put it this way, already devoid of any qualities that might have set the poetic imaginations of Eliot, Auden, or Pound afire. Perhaps Ogden Nash could have come up with a clever rhyme about alligators.

Most of the time, his poems, like insurance forms, fail to hook me. There are a few exceptions, however, where, as if in spite of himself, an image floats up from the midst of a sea of un-followable words and strikes me, hard. This, for example, from "The Man with the Blue Guitar" of 1937:

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or bloodAnd whichever it may be, is it mine?

Maybe it's the rhyme scheme manqué, the fact that if 'wine' and 'blood' had been reversed we would have had a pleasing, Nash-worthy rhyme. Or maybe it's that the question hits so close to home.

Stevens's grasp of French is so-so. He likes puerile onomatopoeia ('tum-ti tum-tum', and so on), and for some reason strongly prefers the sun to the moon. Much of the poetry is about poetry, and often what he takes poetry to be for remains, after reading, strange to me.

There is one striking exception: 'Men Made Out of Words', of whose year of composition I am uncertain:

What should we be without the sexual myth, The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash--Life consistsOf propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeatsAnd by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes downThe eccentric propositions of its fate.

This poem seem to explain how an insurance salesman in Hartford, Connecticut, who likes nothing more than his vacations in Florida, might nonetheless be a poet; and at the same time how I, in spite of the fact that nothing really happens in my life anymore, that in an important sense all experiences have been played out already, and from this point on it all really just amounts to management-- how I, in such a condition, could nonetheless come to believe that poetry is what matters most.